Thursday, October 27

A couple of weeks before I was due to break up for the summer the Fiat Ducato overheated and blew the cylinder head. It had been showing signs for a while, I had recently put in a new radiator hoping that would help but no, on a little trip saw the needle go up quite suddenly and she blew. Got it back to the storage and rung around to try to find a garage to take on the job, you would think in a city like Aberdeen, teeming with engineering firms that wouldn't be a problem. I rang a few garages I knew but either they couldn't help or just weren't interested. Finally a firm in Ellon promised me they could do it.
The Ellon garage were rubbish, once they had the van they messed me about something rotten, in the end all they could offer was to import a new engine from Italy, £10,000!. In the end I found a reconditioned engine and a firm to put it in, Essex. They were great and very helpful, but this is it no matter what you want by way of any service in Aberdeen is always so poor and over priced.
On the journey bringing the van home I had a wheel bearing go, to recover the van and replace the bearing, £100. A well known company in Aberdeen charged me £600 for replacing 3 wheel bearings a couple of years ago.
Services tend to be so poor or over priced we have a list but now we have to revisiting the list using firms that were not as bad as the other firms. Anyway that a long (8 weeks) story short.